Disconnection Issues Continues in Poker Industry

DDoS Attacks, also referred to as Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks, is becoming a major issue in online poker, seemingly with Pokerstars and Full Tilt being the only sites who can cope with the scale of attacks that is being launched at them.

Lately there has been confirmation from several US-friendly networks that they are under attack from DDoS attacks, such as the Equity Poker Network, Merge and the Winning Poker Network. Furthermore iPoker, Party Poker, Ongame and Enet has been hit with attacks for non-US players.

The Winning Poker Network has been hit hard with the DDoS attacks, primarily targeted towards their tournaments. This has led to a decrease in players playing, a cancelled $1 million tournament and a general bad reputation nowadays. The WPN have however installed security measures to try and cope with these new attacks, but it seems that they aren’t working.

Even as late as last night the network was hit with DDoS attacks, shutting down several already-running tournaments. Similar issues were reported at the Revolution Network and on the Party Poker Network, showing that nobody can really feel safe anymore.

So what is there to do in these cases? The networks and sites aren’t really joining forces to see if the source of the attacks is the same, it seems that only Pokerstars and Full Tilt has the money to afford withstanding the attacks and it seems that there’s not going to be any end on it in the near future.

It will only be a matter of time before most players will begin to leave the sites under constant attacks, due to it being impossible to play there. This could lead to some major changes in online poker traffic, with players changing networks to play on and with the security being heightened overall.

Daniel Allermand - Igaming.org Reporter

Daniel Allermand is a freelance writer, with more than 4 years of experience in the industry as an operator, affiliate and poker player. Daniel has decided it was time to try and bring more coverage about the industry to the general public by writing articles about everything from poker to casino.